You're Not Bad At Cold Calling. You're Hiding From It.

One job I know every seller tries to avoid.

Cold Calling.

It’s always easy to find other work to keep you busy. You spend half a day preparing a list of prospects, finding the right contact details, scanning the news to see if there’s any information about them.

Tasks that always seem more important.

Then you spend the next half of the day coming up with a script. You find scraps of lines you’ve used over the years, mash them up and follow word for word. What’s the worst that could happen?

You don’t really care who picks up. They’ll most likely tell you to get lost or you’ll fumble through a voicemail and need to move on to the next name on the list. Either way, the script will get you through it. Connects might be down but at least you made dials.

Besides, this is beneath you. Smiling and dialling is for SDRs. You’re an enterprise sales rep. This is the stuff for kids middle managers need to babysit in the office. That’s something easy you can tell yourself. As long as the work is beneath you, you never have to find out if you’re any good at it.

That’s what the script is for, right?

That’s not what it’s for. The one thing prospecting asks is that you know something about the person on the other end. The script hides you away from doing just that.